This is a meta issue to track the progress of releases in Elixir. The goal is to include minimum support for releases, then add user conveniences, and then finally work on hot code upgrades with relups and appups.

Milestone 1

The goal here is to add releases to core without many bells and whistles:

• Add new options to Elixir CLI to trim the size of release executables (Revamp Elixir CLI #8595)
• Add basic mix release support to Elixir ([WIP] mix release support #8677)

Milestone 2

The goal here is implement user facing features:

• Add eval, version, start_iex, daemon_iex commands
• Custom steps
• Custom vm.args (and possibly rel/vm.args.eex) and bin/start (and possibly rel/start.eex) files (possibly with a generator?)
• Release configuration (via config providers) and a rewrite of the existing Mix.Config. The default config provider will look a config at config_path |> Path.dirname() |> Path.join("release.exs") and always log if a release config is being used or not. We also need to raise a good error message if Mix.Config is used instead of Config